The techniques of printing were developed in Europe by
craftsmen ignorant of these advances in the Far East. As in China, the
earliest printing took the form of illustrated sheets printed from carved
wooden blocks (known as woodblock printing). These illustrations were
largely religious in nature, simple in design, and meant to be coloured
by hand, and were made by largely anonymous craftsmen, and very few
examples have survived.

The development of printing took a dramatic step forward
thanks to the technological advances made by Johan
Gutenberg, a Goldsmith working in Mainz, Germany, in the middle
of the 15th century.

His revolutionary idea was to use metal to cast each letter
individually as a piece of ‘type’, so that a number of individual
pieces (or letters) would be fitted together to make up a word, sentence,
paragraph, and eventually an entire text or book. Once the printing
had been finished, the type could be broken up from its settings, and
re-used to print another book. This invention of ‘moveable’
(and re-useable) type enabled printing to become a viable economic alternative
to making books by hand (known as manuscripts).

Gutenberg’s invention produced what is regarded
as a landmark in the history of printing, and of western civilisation:
an edition of the Bible in Latin, known as the Gutenberg
Bible (or sometimes as the 42-line Bible, as each page is made up
of 42 lines of type). It was made at his workshop in Mainz between 1453
and 1455, and was certainly complete by 1456. It consists of over 1,300
large pages, in two volumes, and although we do not know exactly how
many copies were originally produced, we do know that 180 were offered
for sale, and that forty-eight copies survive today, about twenty of
them complete. The book was printed with two-colours, black and red,
and was produced to an exceptionally high standard, even more so considering
the experimental processes which must have been required to achieve
any kind of result.